Stolen Beauty

by Laurie Lico Albanese

  Ferdinand brought food to his factory workers, and continued production until the last beets had been processed and run through the machines. When the war began to turn and profits tumbled, he refused to fire any of the men. He paid them at a loss from his own accounts, knowing that their sons would be called to the battlefields and soon even the old men would be ordered to fight for the empire.

  My niece Maria Viktoria was born in 1916, in the depths of the war. Thedy was past forty, and too old for another child, yet she delivered a beautiful, healthy girl—a gift in the midst of darkness. I knew Maria was surely the last child, just as I had been the youngest in my own raucous household. I couldn’t help but feel Thedy and the new infant would need me, and that I could be of use to them.

  “Come to Jungfer Brezan,” I said when I was finally able to reach my sister on the telephone. I knew she was tired; she’d been tired ten years ago. I was younger, and had no caretaking responsibilities of my own.

  “I wish I could come,” Thedy said. “I wish you were here, Adele.”

  I would have gone to Vienna if it were possible, but snow blocked the roads, petrol was in short supply, and it was unreasonable to travel unnecessarily. I had to be satisfied with the post.

  I hungered after news of the child, and when it came, it cheered me a great deal. I visited my bookseller in Prague, and began a library for my niece. Picture books and a crisp new copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s folktales made me feel hopeful even when the Battle of Verdun was raging in France and the world was on the brink of destruction.

  Three years into the war, when the butler brought a telegram to our afternoon dinner table, I was terrified that something had happened to baby Maria. Ferdinand read silently, while I chewed on my fingernail.

  “Klimt had a stroke,” he said, putting the cable down on the table. “I’m sorry, Adele. He’s in Loew Sanatorium. They don’t expect a recovery.”

  “It’s Klimt,” I said. “Not Maria.”

  I was almost relieved. Then I burst into tears.

  By then we all knew the disease that turned men inside out with pustules and tumors, taking their vision, their sanity, and their ability to speak or move. I didn’t want to see my dear Klimt in the agony of advanced syphilis; I was shamefully thankful that the snow-covered roads kept me from going home to Vienna.

  In January Berta telephoned at dawn.

  “Our friend is gone,” she said. She was weeping, but for me the grief had the opposite effect: my throat dried and closed up, my hands went numb, and I could barely say a word. All the days and hours we’d spent together had seemed far in the past, but when he died they all came rushing back—his hand on my face, his tongue on my belly, the paint on his fingertips and the fresh blue air that had once seemed to follow him everywhere.

  Everything was different after that. Klimt had belonged to life before the war, and after he died, the world was uglier and sadder. I’d taken to sleeping long and hard in the country under the dark sky, and under that same dark sky I mourned. I filled half a dozen journals with things I’d never dared to write before—all the things Klimt and I had done and said together. It was my way of grieving.

  By the time I’d finished, Klimt had been gone for almost ten months, and the war was almost over.

  When the emperor surrendered in disgrace, the Treaty of Versailles dissolved the thousand-year empire with a single stroke of the pen, giving birth to the fragile new nations of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania, and Hungary.

  I burned the journals in the fire, poking at the pages until they’d all turned to ash.

  In Vienna, the Ringstrasse was littered with sad veterans who limped along with missing limbs or tapped at the sidewalk with blind men’s canes. Amputees and the wounded filled every street corner, shaking their cups at me. Once I would have passed them without hesitating, but I found myself opening my change purse and dropping silver coins into their upturned palms.

  A few months after the end of the war, we moved into our new home at 18 Elisabethstrasse, and I had our Klimt collection returned from the museum. It was like a gathering of old friends, as if Klimt had left the best part of himself for me, alone.

  I hung Beech Forest II, Apple Tree, and the Schloss Kammer with my portrait in my private rooms, ordered new green velvet chairs from the Wiener Werkstätte, and had Koloman Moser design new decorative paper for my walls. I framed Klimt’s photograph and put it on a table beside my stained glass lamp.

  When it came time to declare our new nationalities, Thedy and I chose Austrian—as did our mother—while Ferdinand and his brother chose Czech. We all agreed that having passports for both new nations ensured our options for the future.

  “If there’s ever a question of bloodlines, our children can claim whatever is safer and more prosperous,” Thedy said. She was holding little Maria on her lap. The girl was dressed in pink frills, her hair in a big ribbon. We toasted the future, and I vowed to begin Maria’s education that very day. Her brothers were boisterous; her beautiful sister was already distracted by the trivialities of ornament and society. I did not want Maria’s future left to fate or chance.

  “Let’s hope the peace lasts,” I said.

  “Don’t be a pessimist,” Thedy said. “There’s no reason to think anything but the best is ahead for us.”

  Thedy was wrong.

  I’d barely finished putting the final touches on my new library when the Spanish influenza swept through Austria and across the globe. Young and old died, rich and poor. At night I lay alone in bed and heard the collective weeping, coughing, and wheezing of Vienna, the wail of ambulances going slowly through the evening and the death rattle of the trucks gathering bodies for the morgue.

  I developed a troubling cough that winter that wouldn’t settle, and rang for Dr. Tandler, who came before dawn on a white-cold January morning.

  “This is the only time I could make for you,” he said. “I barely have time to sleep.”

  He’d lost weight during the war, and his hair had gone completely gray. He gave me camphor for my chest and an expectorant for the cough, and told me to stay inside.

  “There’s sickness and desperation everywhere,” he said as he closed up his black bag. He refused to give me a bill for his services. “Donate money to the poor instead, Adele. There are thousands of young mothers who’ve lost their husbands and have no money for food or heat.”

  With half of Austria sick or dying, businesses and restaurants closed their doors again. Thedy refused to leave the house with her children, and I didn’t blame her one bit. Caution was her rule. When my cough was gone I promised to go directly from my bath to her home, and to wear a face mask in the streets, and my sister agreed to let me visit.

  I went for Maria. I believe Thedy knew that it was the little girl who enchanted me and troubled me; the little girl of whom I dreamt at night. My sister could teach her daughter how to run a perfect household and perform brilliantly as wife, mother, and hostess. But it was I who could teach Maria about literature, books, and a life of the mind. It was I who could tell her about truth, beauty, and tragedy, and how one depended upon another just as night depended on day.

  I’d paid little attention to Maria’s older sister when Louise was young, but it was not too late for Maria. I would be her Karl, and I would be alert to the older children drowning out her voice at the dinner table, as my brothers’ had nearly drowned out mine.

  On Maria’s fourth birthday I wrapped a new wooden chess set, a harmonica, and a fat picture book in brown paper, and tied them with colored ribbons. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the streets were swirling with snow.

  “Look, Thedy, I wore the face mask,” I said, yanking off the ridiculous thing as we stomped the snow off our boots. “Ferdinand did, too.”

  As soon as the maid took our coats, my sister began updating us on the gossip about friends and family.

  “The Aschers’ son was accepted at Zurich medical school,” she rattled on. She was wearing
her hair clasped in a broach, as I’d seen in the fashionable stores along the Graben. “And I’m sure you’ve heard what Arnold Schoenberg is doing at the music society.”

  I didn’t care about any of that just then, I told her. I put the gifts on the coffee table, and hugged the little girl. Maria’s hair was shining, and her shoes were clean and white. Gustav fetched his cello from the study, and my sister gave instructions for the luncheon to be served. My nephews and Louise came in and kissed me one by one.

  “We’ll have music this afternoon,” Thedy said. “It will do us good.”

  Before the music began, I asked Maria to sit with me on the davenport. She unwrapped the illustrated book of Greek myths, and I turned to the story of Demeter and Persephone.

  “Here’s the daughter,” I said, pointing to Demeter. “And here’s her mother.”

  The drawing was reminiscent of a Klimt painting. The girl’s swirling yellow hair was sprinkled with flowers and ribbons; her mother was serene and queenly in a white toga and leafy crown.

  Maria spotted Hades poking his head up from the underworld, and stabbed at the page.

  “He looks mean,” she said. She pointed to Hades’s three-headed dog. “And scary.”

  She pulled the book close to her face, and studied Persephone’s terrified expression as Hades carried her below the earth. It struck me that the picture said the same thing about life that I’d seen in Klimt’s mural on that first night in the Secession building: beauty and horror, side by side.

  I turned the page. Persephone was standing in the Hall of Hades. Demeter was distraught. There was something important in the story that I wanted my niece to understand—not just about a young woman’s vulnerability, but about the will to survive and endure.

  Maria and I counted the six pomegranate seeds, and talked about the dark empty winter fields. We cheered when Persephone finally was freed. At the end, I put an arm around her, and whispered in her ear.

  “You’re a girl, but you can do anything,” I said quietly. I wanted Maria to know there could exist in her a ferocious courage. I wanted her to know that inner strength might save her one day, just as it had saved me. “You can learn anything, you can become anything.”

  She looked up at me, and just as I thought I’d reached her, she burst into tears.

  “What just happened?” Thedy took the child right off my lap.

  “I have no idea,” I said, but I did know, and I resolved to be even more attentive to Maria after that. I did not wish to frighten her, but she had to understand what was within her reach.

  MARIA

  1940

  Fritz and I left our Liverpool home at daybreak, each carrying a single suitcase. I shut the door behind me without looking back, and whispered a little prayer for safe passage and happiness in America. The only thing I would miss about our flat was the phonograph and records that had filled our evenings.

  “We’ll get a brand-new phonograph when we get there,” Fritz said, tucking a hand under my chin.

  I wore a brown cloth coat, and a plain brown hat. At the docks, there were smartly dressed women who looked as though they’d never suffered during the war, and a marching band playing as we climbed up the long gangplank.

  Just before I stepped onto the S.S. Britannic, it felt as if I were letting go of the land beneath my feet. My vision clouded, and I stumbled.

  “Are you all right?” Fritz caught my arm. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a wheelchair and being rolled up to the ocean liner.

  At the top of the gangplank, two men in white helped me to my feet. I gently unwound my arms from theirs, determined to stand on my own. I thought of all the stories that had given me strength as a girl, and set my feet one in front of the other as Fritz wrapped his arm around my waist and guided me.

  “You’re strong, Maria,” he said, and, “That’s my Duckling, you’re so brave,” until we reached our cabin and I collapsed on the bed.

  From that first moment on the ship I was in a new world. Many of our fellow passengers were Americans returning home. We drank Coca-Cola for the first time, and ate baked macaroni and cheese with sliced bread and butter. Some of the people on board were on holiday, so they dressed in gowns for dinner and danced into the evening.

  The ship’s crew did its best to keep things merry on board, but one didn’t need to walk into too many corners to hear talk of the war and its horrors: the thousands who couldn’t get travel visas, the dogs the Germans used to sniff out Jews, the trains that went east and came back empty. Women in black hats and red lipstick appeared at dinner with cruel-looking men, and I was reminded of the German women I’d seen tromping through Berlin with hard determination.

  “Where do those women come from?” I asked Fritz. “Where did they learn to dress that way, and look so cold?”

  “At the cabarets and on the streets,” he said. “Those aren’t women with families, darling. Those are women who’ve attached themselves to bad men to escape something worse.”

  Something worse? Something worse than Landau? I watched them parade through the ship with their dark mouths and sharp eyes and when I passed them on deck, I shielded my belly with both hands.

  At the end of our first week at sea a storm came, and the roiling ocean pounded above and below us. The doctor’s medicine worked for the first half hour, but after that there was no respite. Fritz called the ship doctor, who said I had to keep down whatever fluids I could manage.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  I fell into a dark tunnel then, aching for my father as if he’d just died, wailing some long-forgotten prayers that I didn’t recall ever learning. The storm was unforgiving, and as it pounded against the portals I saw Landau reaching for me. I smelled Chanel No. 5 and imagined I was one of the dead.

  When Fritz came at dawn with lipstick smudged on his collar, I put a finger to it and fought back tears.

  “An old Polish lady insisted on dancing with me, Duck,” he said. “She was from Warsaw, with a big saggy bust and too much lipstick. I didn’t have the heart to turn her down.”

  The lipstick was dark red, from a hard mouth.

  “I’ve been sick all night,” I choked out. “How could you?”

  “It’s hard for me, too, Maria,” he said, looking away.

  “You have to stop this, Fritz,” I said. I was tempted to tell him what had happened. I was tempted to tell him what I’d done for him. I tried to drag myself from the edge of the violent sea, but there was nothing to resist it. The world was at war, and everything was black.

  Forty-three-year-old Gustav Ucicky leads the deliverymen into his cherrywood-lined parlor overlooking Vienna’s Volksgarten. His swastika pin shines on his lapel, and his new, young wife is waiting for him in the bedroom in her pink peignoir.

  “Be careful with that one,” Ucicky says to the men.

  They unwrap the painting and wait while Ucicky inspects the frame, the golden castle, and the blue waters of Lake Attersee. When he’s satisfied that the painting is authentic and undamaged, he signs the delivery papers and tips the men.

  Feeling ebullient, he telephones the Nazi attorney who made the deal for him.

  “I knew you would be resourceful,” Ucicky says.

  “I traded Klimt’s Lady in Gold for your painting,” Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s lawyer says. “You can see it now in the Belvedere.”

  “I don’t have to go to a museum to see my father’s art anymore,” Ucicky says. “I have five of his best pieces right here in my home.”

  ADELE

  1921

  The porch at Jungfer Brezan was cool and shady in the July afternoon, and I pushed the glider back and forth in the breeze. Maria was snuggled against me with an alphabet primer, and we were reading a new word for every letter. The little girl’s toes were bare, and she smelled of the bath. When she got to the letter Z, she jumped up and started to buzz around the room like a little bug, flapping her hands for wings and running in a circle tha
t made me dizzy.

  Thedy came in from the garden wearing a summer dress and an old straw hat, and put out a hand as if to catch her little bumblebee in a net.

  “There’s a groundskeeper for that,” I said when I saw the dirt smeared on my sister’s apron.

  “But I love the flower garden,” she said, grinning. “I enjoy digging in the dirt.”

  “Only because you don’t have to,” I said.

  She was holding a big bunch of purple hydrangea that matched her little girl’s dress. Outside, I could hear the older boys calling to one another as they got ready to drive to a beer garden in Prague. Louise was away at a conservatory, studying dance and the flute.

  “I want to go with the boys,” Maria said, popping out her bottom lip.

  “No you don’t,” Thedy said. “You want to stay here with Mama and Aunt Adele.”

  “Maybe she wants to go swimming,” I said. “Do you want to go swimming, Maria?”

  “She wants to go wherever the boys go,” Thedy said. “Just like you always did.”

  Maria ran to the doorway and peered out into the bright day. I saw my young self in the way she held herself up as straight as she could, on her tiptoes.

  “I want to be big,” Maria said.

  “I’ll take her down to the lake.” I pushed myself out of the swing, and felt a pain shoot through my hips. I was almost forty years old, and sometimes felt as stiff as an old woman. “I’ll go with the nursemaid if you don’t want to go.”

  Thedy put the flowers down on the wooden table, and called for Maria’s nurse.

  “In this heat, she still needs an afternoon nap,” Thedy said. “But as soon as she’s older, you can take her on all the outings that you like.”

  Two years later, Maria and I stepped out of the car at the foot of the Belvedere gardens on a spring morning. My niece was wearing a red-and-white dress, and her long braid was tied with a polka dot ribbon. The formal gardens stretched behind us and pebbles crunched underfoot. I couldn’t decide if I was impressed by the way Maria carried herself so carefully in her new brown shoes, or if I wished that she had the spunk and energy of the boys who were kicking fat new footballs ahead of exasperated nannies.